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Tag Archives: ATF

Since the day President Obama was elected, gun owners have been on an unprecedented buying spree, purchasing everything from .22 ammunition to every kind of semi-automatic firearm available.

Their fears are not unwarranted — especially because, for a while, the federal government seemed to be racing private owners to buy the ammo first.

Closer examination shows that some fears of federal activity on this front are overblown. Others, though, are deeply rooted in legitimate concerns.

While Obama claims to support “common-sense” gun laws, he has made high-profile public announcements telegraphing his anti-gun intentions and engaged in behind-the-scenes gun control — tweaking government regulations to deny gun rights to veterans, seeking the same for Social Security recipients, and using the ATF to ban certain types of popular ammo. Calling guns more dangerous than terrorism, Obama recently indicated he’ll devote the rest of his time as president to gun control.

Calling guns more dangerous than terrorism, Obama says he’ll devote the rest of his time as president to gun control.

But one event in particular fed fears of back-door government gun control: the unprecedented purchase of ammunition by the feds.

Next Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of one of the most horrific crimes in U.S. history: the Oklahoma City bombing.

On April 19, 1995, a disgruntled military veteran named Timothy McVeigh drove a rental truck packed with explosives into downtown Oklahoma City and detonated it in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building at 9:02 a.m. Central time.

Emergency crews raced across the United States to Oklahoma City to aid the rescue effort. When it ended two weeks later, the death toll had reached 168 people, including 19 small children who were in the building’s day-care center when the blast went off.

As promised, President Obama is using executive actions to impose gun control on the nation, targeting the top-selling rifle in the country, the AR-15 style semi-automatic, with a ban on one of the most-used AR bullets by sportsmen and target shooters.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives this month revealed that it is proposing to put the ban on 5.56 mm ammo on a fast track, immediately driving up the price of the bullets and prompting retailers, including the huge outdoors company Cabela’s, to urge sportsmen to urge Congress to stop the president.

Wednesday night, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stepped in with a critical letter to the bureau demanding it explain the surprise and abrupt bullet ban. The letter is shown below.

The National Rifle Association, which is working with Goodlatte to gather co-signers, told Secrets that 30 House members have already co-signed the letter and Goodlatte and the NRA are hoping to get a total of 100 fast.

“The Obama administration was unable to ban America’s most popular sporting rifle through the legislative process, so now it’s trying to ban commonly owned and used ammunition through regulation,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA-ILA, the group’s policy and lobby shop. “The NRA and our tens of millions of supporters across the country will fight to stop President Obama’s latest attack on our Second Amendment freedoms.”

In a move clearly intended by the Obama Administration to suppress the acquisition, ownership and use of AR-15s and other .223 caliber general purpose rifles, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives unexpectedly announced today that it intends to ban commonplace M855 ball ammunition as “armor piercing ammunition.” The decision continues Obama’s use of his executive authority to impose gun control restrictions and bypass Congress.

It isn’t even the third week of February, and the BATFE has already taken three major executive actions on gun control. First, it was a major change to what activities constitute regulated “manufacturing” of firearms. Next, BATFE reversed a less than year old position on firing a shouldered “pistol.” Now, BATFE has released a “Framework for Determining Whether Certain Projectiles are ‘Primarily Intended for Sporting Purposes’ Within the Meaning of 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(17)(c)”, which would eliminate M855’s exemption to the armor piercing ammunition prohibition and make future exemptions nearly impossible.

According to emails obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, federal authorities planned to monitor gun show parking lots with automatic license plate readers.

The insight comes from a damning report released by the ACLU this week on a secretive program by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to build a massive database of license plates images collected by automated license plate reader devices. As part of this investigation, emails released through the Freedom of Information Act detailed a planned cooperation between the DEA’s National License Plate Recognition initiative and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to scan and record the plates and vehicle images of gun show attendees.

“DEA Phoenix Division Office is working closely with ATF on attacking the guns going to [redacted] and the gun shows, to include programs/operation with LPRs at the gun shows,” reads an April 2009 email.

The time and place mentioned in the email coincides with known information on the Justice Department’s Fast and Furious operation, a controversial “gunwalking” scandal that possibly transferred as many as 2,000 guns to drug traffickers in Mexico. That program was run out of the Phoenix ATF Field Division office, just two miles from the DEA office.

However, DOJ officials were quick to issue denials this week following the release of the story, advising that the ATF did not in fact engage in tracking gun show attendees.

Just as Second Amendment civil rights activists feared, federal government bureaucrats were supplying illegal firearms to Mexican drug cartels in the expectation that it would led to pressure for more regulation. Analyzing a 60 page document release in response to a FOIA action by Judicial Watch Attkisson writes:

Justification for New Gun Control Regulations

ATF’s internal Public Affairs Talking Points show the agency was using Fast and Furious to help justify new gun control regulations–without telling the public that ATF was actually facilitating the delivery of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

The talking points (p. 15) state:

“These cases demonstrate the ongoing trafficking of firearms by Mexican DTO’s and other associated groups operating in Arizona and the need for reporting of multiple sales for certain types of rifles in order to ferret out those intent on providing firearms to these criminal groups.”

There is much more in her report, so read the whole thing. But keep in mind:

Clues as to why President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder kept the public documents secret for so long may be found in one 60-page release examined below. Nearly three years after-the-fact, its news value is diminished. If these documents had been turned over when Congress subpoenaed them or when they were first requested under FOI law, they would have revealed damaging information in the lead-up to President Obama’s re-election in 2012. By exerting executive privilege, the President and Holder kept them hidden until the court challenge forced their release.

According to a Justice Department watchdog group, it appears that the “Operation Fast and Furious” fiasco might have a part 2. The group says that Federal agents and prosecutors made a ridiculous amount of errors while investigating a U.S. citizen who was smuggling military surplus grenade components into Mexico for conversion into real grenades that cartel’s could use. (H/T FoxNews)

The highly critical report stated that the ATF “did not adequately consider the risk to public safety in the United States and Mexico created by the subjects’ illegal activities.”